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Recent violence against Tesla dealerships will be labeled domestic terrorism, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday as he selected a new Tesla car to show support for the electric carmaker’s chief, his ally Elon Musk. Shares of the automaker closed nearly 4% higher on Tuesday, rebounding from the biggest one-day fall in four-and-a half years on Monday. Activists have lately staged so-called Tesla Takedown protests to voice displeasure over Musk’s role in sweeping cuts to the federal workforce at the behest of Trump and cancellation of contracts that fund humanitarian programs around the world. Musk, the world’s richest person, is spearheading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. “They’re harming a great American company,” Trump said at the White House, referring to the demonstrators. Nearby, a number of Tesla vehicles were lined up on the driveway between the mansion and the south lawn. “Let me tell you, you do it to Tesla, and you do it to any company, we’re going to catch you, and . . . you’re going to go through hell.” About 350 demonstrators protested outside a Tesla electric vehicle dealership in Portland, Oregon, last week, while nine people were arrested during a raucous demonstration outside a New York City Tesla dealership earlier in March. There have also been recent reports of vandalism on Tesla vehicles and showrooms that are under investigation. Trump’s decision to buy a Tesla electric vehiclehe chose a Model Swas a significant show of support for Musk, who has come under criticism for his work in Washington. Model S pricing starts at about $80,000. Trump, in the driver’s seat of the shiny red car, said he’s not allowed to drive anymore but would keep the vehicle at the White House for his staff to use. He said he would pay by check and did not want a discount from Musk. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump defended Musk, saying he was “putting it on the line” to help the country and was doing a “fantastic” job. “I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American,” Trump said. Musk thanked the president for his support on his own social media platform X. Trump in January took aim at electric vehicles, revoking a 2021 executive order signed by his predecessor Joe Biden that sought to ensure half of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2030 were electric. Tesla’s market capitalization has more than halved since hitting an all-time high of $1.5 trillion on December 17, erasing most of the gains the stock made after Musk-backed Trump won the U.S. election in November. The stock’s decline since December stems from falling vehicle sales and profit, protests against Musk’s political activity, and investor worries that politics was distracting the billionaire from tending to his cash cow. But at the White House event with Trump, Musk said he would double production in the next two years. “As a function of the great policies of President Trump and his administration and an act of faith in America, Tesla is going to double vehicle output in the United States within the next two years,” he said. Musk said in January that Tesla was working hard to increase annual volumes this year, after posting its first drop in annual deliveries in 2024. He did not reiterate an earlier promise of 20%-30% growth in vehicle sales this year. Musk told reporters on Tuesday he would stay in Washington as long as he was useful, but said he would remain Tesla’s CEO. Jeff Mason and Abhirup Roy, Reuters Reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington and Abhirup Roy in San Francisco; additional reporting by Shubham Kalia and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru.
Category:
E-Commerce
Mondays sell-off on Wall Street sent consumers into a panic as talk of a recession continued to heat up. Most S&P 500 stocks are now in correction territory, and the trade war with Canada, Mexico, and China continues to heat up. Tuesdays trading, meanwhile, was something of a roller-coaster, with stocks yo-yoing and finally settling at another loss. The Dow fell 478 points, or 1.14%, with the Nasdaq index slipping 42 points (0.75%) and the S&P 500 largely flat, losing 32 points. Heres the good news. Despite all the negative news and Mondays sell-off, were not in a recession yetand its far from a sure thing. Consumer spending recently posted its first drop in nearly two years, but its still in a very healthy range. That said, the whiplash youre feeling is far from unjustified. Three weeks ago, stocks were at or near all-time highs, and few economists were talking about a recession. These days, its seemingly all anyone can talk about. What the analysts say Goldman Sachs on Friday increased its odds of a recession over the next 12 months from 15% to 20%, writing in a note to clients that we see policy changes as the key risk. Put another way: Goldman is keeping a close eye on tariffs. If Donald Trump is willing to back off of them as recession risks increase, the firm wrote, a recession can be avoided. If not . . . If the White House remained committed to its policies even in the face of much worse data, Goldman Sachs wrote, recession risk would rise further. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys Analytics, is less optimistic, however. He currently puts the odds of a recession at better than one in threebut he agrees tariffs are the trigger. The risks of a U.S. recession starting in the coming year are uncomfortably high and rising, he wrote Monday in a post on X. I would put them at 35%, up from 15% at the start of the year. For context, the typical recession probability is 15%the U.S. economy historically suffers a recession every 6 or 7 years on average. The economy will likely suffer a downturn if the Trump administration follows through on the tariff increases it has announced and maintains those tariffs for more than a few months. JPMorgan is the bear of Wall Street on this particular topic, putting the odds at 40%. Trump himself stoked fears on Sunday, when he said, I hate to predict things like that, when asked about the prospect of a recession, adding there is a period of transition. What to watch Technically, a recession can be declared after at least two consecutive quarters of declining economic output. So it would be July before any recession calls could be formalized. The effects of an economic downturn could be felt sooner, though. The numbers to watch to get a sense of where the economy is going are employment (which has seen employers add between 150,000 and 200,000 jobs per month since December), wage growth (which has been outpacing inflation for almost two years) and consumer spending (which showed a 2% drop in February). Keeping up with the fast pace of change in tariffs can be exhausting. On Tuesday alone, Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum imports to 50% following a decision by the Ontario government to impose a 25% tax on electricity exports to the U.S. By mid-afternoon, however, Ontario suspended its surcharge and Trump later walked back his escalation. So, rather than monitoring the day-to-day minutia, experts say its best to keep an eye on how widespread Trumps tariffs end up being. Tariffs themselves, depends how you use it, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Stanford Graduate School of Business in an interview released last weekend. [When used] as a tool or kind of a weapon to doin some casesgood stuff its very modestly inflationary, I mean youre talking about 0.1% or 0.2%. Now if you put 25% tariffs on all imports, thats a lot more. That could be, in my view, quite recessionary and inflationary.
Category:
E-Commerce
More bad news out of the federal government this week, and its only Tuesday: The Trump administration and its chaotic Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are now turning their sights on kids’ school lunches, the latest casualty in the administration’s war on the federal government’s budget. “Millions of children could lose free school meals,” the School Nutrition Association (SNA) said in a statement, as a result of the $1 billion in cuts to the Department of Agriculture (USDA). That means about $660 million of those funds will no longer go to feeding needy children in schools and childcare facilities, set up through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program. Those funds were meant to purchase healthy, local, and regional foods for school meals, supplied by local farmers and ranchers. Also cut: federal funds to purchase from those farmers for food banks and other organizations. These proposals [come] . . . at a time when working families are struggling with rising food costs, said Shannon Gleave, president of the SNA. Meanwhile, short-staffed school nutrition teams, striving to improve menus and expand scratch-cooking, would be saddled with time-consuming and costly paperwork created by new government inefficiencies. According to the SNA, one proposed cut to the Community Eligibility Provision would eliminate free meals available to some 12 million students in 24,000 schools nationwide, all with high-poverty rates. This is all bad news for our nation’s children and parents, as well as teachers and schools, which are already reeling from the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education, which Trump has attacked, calling it a “big con job.” It’s also another blow to American families, who are already reeling from the rising cost of food and having to increasingly turn to food banks, while Republicans push for more cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for those with the lowest incomes, according to the Guardian.
Category:
E-Commerce
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